Back the Bus Strikers! Fight for Job Security vs. Billionaire Mayor

NEW YORK CITY, January 25 — “We are not going to back down or give up! We will see this thing through to the end!” exclaimed a striker as school bus drivers and matrons continued to brave the freezing cold on the picket lines. The spirit and militancy of the workers are unmistakable. They see clearly what they’re up against and are determined to stand up to billionaire Mayor Bloomberg and the bosses who are trying to void the job security provisions in their contract, won by a strike in the 1970s. They hail from all over the world, including Latin America, the Caribbean and Europe. Many have a deep understanding that workers need to fight back.
Almost every worker on the picket line will agree that while they might have seen a strike as a last resort, now that it’s on, they’re in it to win it! At one of the major sites, cars and trucks are honking all day in support as workers from local stores brought coffee to the workers. The weather has become dangerously cold, but the struggle continues!

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Communist School Points Way to Red Future

BROOKLYN, NY, January 18 — This past weekend, teachers and students gathered together for PL’s annual winter Communist School. The purpose of the School is to help current and future members understand how PLP can fight against capitalism to win a better world.
On Friday, the first day of the School, participants viewed a screening of “The Central Park Five,” a film about racist police intimidation and arrest. It documents the story of five black teenagers who were falsely arrested for raping a white woman in 1989. Although there was not a shred of evidence against them, the cops used physical and psyschological abuse and the prosecution pushed through with false testimony and threw the kids in jail.

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Bosses’ Racist Legal System Gun Aimed at Working Class

A Brooklyn, NY church held a forum on the issues related to the mass incarceration of black and Latino youth and workers. It was a follow-up to reading Michelle Alexander’s widely read book The New Jim Crow. Over 100 people heard a panel of community leaders and activists present their experiences with the realities of this systematic, racist attack on black and Latino communities.
In short, with the excuse of a “war on drugs,” the bosses set in place a system of what seems like “colorblind” laws such as the Rockefeller Drug Laws, mandatory sentencing, and policing methods like Stop-and-Frisk and community policing. But, because these policing tactics are carried out almost exclusively in black and Latin communities, the racist outcome is many thousands of people being terrorized, arrested and fed into the criminal justice system.

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Sandy Survivors Expose ‘Red Cross Double Cross’

NEW YORK CITY, January 16 — “Red Cross, Double Cross. Red Cross, Double Cross” chanted Sandy survivors and supporters, including Progressive Labor Party members and friends, as they picketed the New York City headquarters of the Red Cross for the second time. Five weeks ago, Far Rockaway evacuees whom we had met at a shelter had been placed in Manhattan and Queens hotels with no funds for food, clothes, or other supplies. After demonstrating at the Red Cross, assistance was obtained for one month. Now it had run out and people were desperate.

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Philly Workers Indict Hospital Bosses’ ‘Slave Thing’

PHILADELPHIA, January 28 — “The bosses got this slave thing going on,” a Philadelphia hospital worker complains. She observes that supervisors are more disrespectful and quick to write up workers for insubordination. Then there’s the two-tier wage system and biometric testing brought in by the contract in July 2012, which are used to divide workers.
Another hospital worker noticed that the bosses at their hospital are hiring many new inexperienced workers, especially nurses. These new workers more readily follow supervisors’ orders to do work in other workers’ job descriptions. Meanwhile older, more experienced workers are more frequently harassed. And everyone is being overworked.

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Cuomo’s Hospital Closures: A Life-and-Death Battle

ALBANY, NY, January 8 — Nearly 1,000 workers rallied here in a fight to prevent the closing of Downstate Hospital, stop layoffs and preserve patient services. Rising at 4:00 a.m., they used a vacation day to board buses from Brooklyn to the State Capital. Black and Latino women workers led the way, bringing family and friends.
The closing or privatization of this hospital, which serves central Brooklyn’s predominantly black and Latino population where healthcare needs are the highest, is a racist and sexist attack. It will ultimately take patient lives and cause the death of their community. Already 400 layoffs and the threat of many more to come are devastating these workers and patient care. Actually privatization has already begun. Outsourced non-union cleaners are replacing those laid off.

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PL’ers Join Fight vs. Israeli Apartheid, Racist Evictions

Israel-Palestine, January 12 — More than two dozen working-class supporters, both Jewish and international, came to show solidarity with three of the so-called  “unrecognized” villages in the Negev. Two PL’ers joined this important fight against apartheid and racist evictions and demolitions in the south.
Approximately 150,000 Bedouins live in the Negev, the vast majority in the “Siag” area — a tiny reservation between the city of Beersheba and the towns of Omer and Dimona. Before the state of Israel was established in 1948, Bedouins lived in the entire Negev (which is 60% of Israel-Palestine’s land) and had their own, pre-capitalist system of tribal land ownership. The majority of Bedouins were deported from the Negev between 1947 and 1959, and the rest were forced to re-settle in the Siag area.
Farmers Become Proletarians
Until 1967 they, like all Arabs under Israeli rule, lived under martial law and their movement was strictly limited. In the 1960’s, the Israeli government decided to settle the Bedouins, formerly semi-nomadic herders and farmers, in dense state-planned towns. One reason for this move was to remove the Bedouin peasantry from its ancestral land and give that land over to the state for the benefit of the Zionist movement and its rich U.S. and Western European backers.
Another reason was to try to give the Bedouins no other option than being wage-laborers in the service of Israeli bosses.
Today, half of the entire Bedouin population in the Negev lives in seven (mis-)planned towns, where there are no jobs and where crime, unemployment and drugs are common. The rest live in villages without infrastructure such as proper running water, sewage or electricity, and without services such as healthcare or schooling. They usually have to make do with generators and improvised wells and travel for long distances to get to a hospital or a school.

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EL Salvador: PLP Combats History of Military Dictators

EL SALVADOR — Since 1927, 14 families have “democratically” dominated El Salvador through military dictators. There have been many elections in El Salvador’s history, elections in which the military  candidates always won while the opposition was always killed or exiled.
The capitalist class in El Salvador follows imperialist orders, especially from the U.S. The current ruling class, who in the past posed as revolutionaries, have proven to be traitors to the workers.
The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) rules for the bosses. Our conditions worsen every day due to unemployment, low wages and murders by the Maras (gangs) and the rulers’ death squads.
For example, in San Sebastian Salitrillo in the state of Santa Ana, five FMLN councilmen have been accused of money laundering. Just like Mayor Francisco Castañeda, all of them have become wealthy with public money. But they authorize budget cuts in health and education. 

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Modern Language Association Convention PL’ers Put Communism on the Agenda

BOSTON, MA, January 6 — Members of PLP active in the Modern Language Association (MLA), along with friends in the Radical Caucus, helped to bring communism and class struggle to the 2013 MLA convention here. 
Party members gave papers on various facets of literary radicalism: the role played by communists in the proletarian and post-colonial literary movements; speculation about post-class society in literary works focusing on racism and sexism; debates over the “idea of communism” in current political theory. The current economic crisis, along with the dire job market faced by many humanities scholars and teachers, has many MLA members querying the legitimacy of capitalism. PL members contributed to a sharpening of the discussion and distributed significantly more CHALLENGES than we have in the past.

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Bangladesh: Another Fire, More Sexist Murders = Bosses’ Profits

DHAKA, BANGLADESH, January 27 — Seven young women garment workers were murdered and 50 others were injured yesterday when a deadly fire swept through still another textile factory of mostly women.  “When I tried to escape through the emergency exit, I found the gate locked” Raushan Ara told the Prothom Ala newspaper here. Many workers jumped from the second-story windows to try to escape the flames.
The factory lacked the most basic safety standards. “We did not find fire extinguishers. We did not find any safety measures,” a fire department official told the New York Times (1/27).
Several fire victims were teenagers, as young as 15. Bangladesh’s “laws allow teenagers as young as 14 to work” in these factories” (NYT, 1/25).

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